Doomsday (2008): C+

Neil Marshall deliberately avoids reinventing the wheel with Doomsday, a post-apocalyptic thriller that bluntly melds 28 Days Later, The Road Warrior, Robin Hood and the Flesh Fair sequence from A.I. That, for a time, this hodgepodge works at all is a testament to his no-nonsense approach to the material, which is played fast, cheap and loud during its establishing segments. Having fallen victim to a deadly Reaper virus, Scotland has been quarantined for thirty years behind a giant wall. When the virus reappears in 2035 London, the English prime minster’s (Alexander Siddig) nefarious right-hand man (David O’Hara) – knowing that survivors somehow exist in Scotland – sends in a crack squad of commandos to reenter the closed-off country to find a cure. What team leader Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) discovers behind the iron curtain is a wasteland filled with mohawked, tattooed rejects from Mad Max’s future, as well as a separate colony of medieval knights led by a doctor-turned-king (Malcolm McDowell). Marshall’s orchestration of action is sturdy enough to offset the obvious fact that everything in Doomsday is recycled material from better sources, and Mitra certainly has enough warrior-goddess sex appeal to at least keep one from dozing off. Yet as it slogs through one hectic yet mundane set pieces after another, the film slowly drowns in its own pool of clichés, culminating in a finale that gets the triumphant poses correct but makes no sense.